Emily Siner

News Director

Emily Siner is the news director at Nashville Public Radio and host of the Movers & Thinkers podcast. She also reports on a wide range of topics, including higher education, science and military veterans. She's traveled around Tennessee to tell national breaking news stories for NPR and Marketplace.

Emily began at the station in 2014 to work as an enterprise reporter. She soon launched the station's first podcast, which has grown into a fleet of shows with live events. She became assistant news director in 2016 and news director in 2017. She was named the Associated Press Radio Journalist of the Year and received a regional Edward R. Murrow Award for audio feature reporting.

She's passionate about storytelling on all platforms and spoke at TEDxNashville about the station's efforts to share audio online. Before joining the news staff at WPLN, Emily worked in print and online journalism at the Los Angeles Times and NPR. She was born and raised in the Chicago area, so she is not intimidated by Nashville winters. Emily is a proud graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Ways to Connect

For the past five years, Tennessee entrepreneurs who wanted to launch a new business idea might have tried to catch the eye of Jumpstart Foundry.

Jumpstart is what’s called an accelerator in the tech world. It’s a company that helps other companies grow — playing the roles of mentor, shareholder and money matchmaker. Since its inception, it’s put about 40 fledgling tech companies through a sort of how-to-run-a-business boot camp, setting them up with seasoned advisors and showing them off to potential investors. And it’s been successful. Last year, an MIT business professor ranked Jumpstart the 14th best accelerator in the country.

Tennessee drivers received 102,000 seat belt citations in 2014 — 30,000 more than the year before. According to the Tennessee Highway Patrol, the increasing enforcement of seat belt laws is part of its effort to bring down the number traffic deaths.

By the end of 2014, 952 people died in Tennessee as part of vehicle crashes, compared to 986 in 2013. It’s still too many, says Sgt. Bill Miller, a spokesman for the Tennessee Highway Patrol.

The Tennessee Board of Regents is trying to do away with undecided majors. According to the data, officials say, students who choose a college major right away are more likely to graduate.

“What we know is, a student who makes no choice has made a bad choice,” says TBR chancellor John Morgan.

Without a major, he says, students end up taking extra classes that don’t count toward their degree. Morgan told a group of policy makers, including the governor, that the TBR system would no longer have students with undeclared majors, by the end of December.

Tennessee may once again be home to the world’s fastest supercomputer — and that’s not an easy title to keep. It announced last month it’s building a machine capable of running several times faster than the current leader in China.

The Oak Ridge National Lab supercomputing director talks to reporter Emily Siner about just how powerful that is.

Thomm Jutz, a Nashville songwriter from Germany (who is now a U.S. citizen), has put out a three-part album about one of America’s thorniest periods — the Civil War. Volume 3 of The 1861 Project, which features singers including Kim Richey and Bobby Bare, focuses on the Battle of Franklin. Take a listen to how Jutz crafted the folk music album.

Nashville’s Music City Center has had 750,000 visitors since it opened about a year and a half ago — and a lot of them have probably gotten lost.

The convention center spans 1.2 million square feet over several floors. To help people find their way, the MCC released a smartphone app, called Music City Center. I tried it out after the official launch event Wednesday morning.